Price worked as a teacher of applied mathematics at Raffles College (which was to become part of the University of Singapore in 1948). It was there that he formulated his theory on the exponential growth of science, an idea that occurred to him when he noticed the characteristic log curve of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society between 1665 and 1850, which he had stacked against his wall at home while Raffles College had its library built.

Around 1950, Price adopted his mother's Sephardic name, "de Solla", as a middle name. He was a "British Atheist... from a rather well-known Sephardic Jewish family", and although his Danish wife, Ellen, had been christened as a Lutheran, he did not, according to their son Mark, regard their marriage as "mixed", because they were both atheists.[3]

In 1984, Price received, posthumously, the ASIS Research Award for outstanding contributions in the field of information science.

Scientific contributions

Price's major scientific contributions include:

studies of the exponential growth of science and the half-life of scientific literature; together with the formulation of Price's Law, namely that 25% of scientific authors are responsible for 75% of published papers (Price 1963);

quantitative studies of the network of citations between scientific papers (Price 1965), including the discovery that both the in- and out-degrees of a citation network have power-law distributions, making this the first published example of a scale-free network;

↑De Solla Price, D. J. (1967). "A guide to graduate study and research in the history of science and medicine". Isis; an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences. 58 (3): 385–395. PMID4867473. doi:10.1086/350271.